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I'm Jane Pauley and this is Sunday morning. For just about any question you might have in these troubled times, thank goodness the internet is around to provide the answer. Provided you're among the half of all Americans who can easily log on in the first place.

As for the other half, well that's a different story as David Pogue explains this morning. During the pandemic, high-speed internet has been the foundation of work, school, and doctor visits. Which is great if you have high-speed internet, but about half of Americans don't. To get online, to do your research or your correspondence, you park at a Taco Bell? I do.

Ahead on Sunday morning, the great American internet access crisis. She's a legend of country music, Tanya Tucker. And back before the pandemic shut most concerts down, she shared some stories with our Bob Schieffer. She was once country music's wild child. A breakout star at the ripe old age of 13, Tanya Tucker has been riding high for five decades with a Grammy-winning album that's getting the best reviews of her career. If that 13-year-old Tanya Tucker was sitting here, what would you tell her today? I don't know if I'd tell her anything.

I think she would probably need to talk to me and give me some advice. Later on Sunday morning, it's a new dawn for Tanya Tucker. Vanilla can sometimes be dismissed as perhaps a bit bland, but Seth Doan's travels this morning pretty much prove there's no such thing as plain vanilla. We journeyed to rainforests halfway around the world to truly appreciate a spice so often seen as ordinary. This concept of an orchid that must be pollinated by hand one by one before noon on the one day it flowers, it sounds like something in a fairy tale. It's magical. It's magical. The extraordinarily colorful story of vanilla ahead on Sunday morning. Mo Rocca has some questions for Linda Lavin, best remembered for her TV show Alice, plus hugs from Luke Burbank, thoughts from Jim Gaffigan, and more on this Sunday morning, August 2nd, 2020.

We'll be right back. Turns out the internet doesn't cast nearly as wide a net as we might think. Yes, half of us have fairly reliable service.

Not so the other half. Our cover story is reported by David Pogue. After earning her master's degree, writer Carrie Fugett bought this little farm in rural Oregon.

It seems to have everything, beauty, affordability, and just a 30-minute drive to the city. But she quickly discovered one thing that wasn't available. We don't have internet. We haven't been successful getting it out here yet. So you must be able to get online somehow. What have you been doing? When there isn't a pandemic, I go to a library or I go to a restaurant or a cafe. Now, since the pandemic, all of those places are closed down. If I need internet, Taco Bell has been very reliable. So you're a professional writer, and to get online to do your research or your correspondence, you park at a Taco Bell? I do, and I don't feel like a professional writer when I'm parked at a Taco Bell.

I usually feel pretty embarrassed. As modern Americans, we count among our blessings that most of us have been able to keep going through the pandemic, doing our work, teaching our kids, seeing our doctors, thanks to broadband internet, that is high-speed internet. There's only one problem. Tens of millions of Americans are not connected to broadband internet. The digital divide affects every region of our country. Gigi Sohn worked for the FCC during the Obama administration. How many Americans still don't have broadband?

Depends on who you ask. If you ask the Federal Communications Commission, they'll say it's only something along the lines of 20, 23 million people, and that is a grossly undercounted number. Microsoft has done a study that showed 162 million Americans don't have broadband at the speeds that the FCC defines broadband.

If you're scoring at home, that's about half the population, with either very slow internet or none at all. Why does the FCC so hugely undercount the number of people? What the FCC says is if you can serve one person in a census block, that means you're serving everybody in a census block. Census blocks are map regions that the government uses for reporting population.

A census block can be anything from one city block to hundreds of square miles in rural areas. If I'm the FCC, and there's 5,000 people living in a census block, and one guy has broadband internet, I can record that as 5,000 people? Oh, I'm sure it's not only possible.

I'm sure that is absolutely the case. But having no broadband internet isn't the whole problem. Millions of communities have broadband, according to the FCC, but in the real world, it's too slow to matter. They'd love to have that minimal speed here in Georgetown, Maine. The FCC says that this coastal community has broadband internet because residents can sign up for DSL service.

That's digital subscriber line, basically internet over the phone wires. But in practice... It's terrible. It is absolutely awful. Most of the time, we have little to none, and only occasionally does it get up to mediocre. It's really bad. Resident Tommy Burke says that it got even worse once everyone started staying at home during the pandemic, and worse yet, once the summer residents arrived at their vacation homes. The fact that lots of people are up here now that aren't normally here all the time, the internet is even worse.

Together, we'll review what we know. As the new school year begins, many students will be taking classes remotely over the internet. But for Maine residents like high schooler Kiernan Mann, that's often impossible. Taking notes in class with the internet is pretty hard because the screen might freeze and I can't hear anybody, and then they might just go through all the notes without me and I have to catch up. In cities like Austin, Texas, so many kids weren't online last semester that the school system had to print and mail 40,000 homework packets a week. And they resorted to filling school buses with portable Wi-Fi hotspots and parking them near apartment complexes where a lot of people have no broadband service.

Now, you might say, Austin? Shining star of high-tech American cities? But according to Gigi Sohn, Austin illustrates the biggest broadband problem of all. The vast majority of Americans who don't have broadband internet access is because they can't afford it, because the price is too high. And sure enough, the U.S. has the third most expensive broadband internet in the developed world, mostly because there's not much competition. It's just a money problem and not a problem of putting wires in the ground. We should be complaining about both, the lack of actual network infrastructure in many places, but also the cost.

The thing is, we've fixed problems like this before. In 1934, only 11% of rural Americans had electricity. President Franklin Roosevelt created the Rural Electrification Administration. New lines going up almost everywhere at the rate of 500 miles a day.

And within 20 years, 90% of those homes had cheap, reliable electricity. Now, over the years, the government has come up with a basket of programs designed to help with internet affordability and accessibility. Unfortunately, Sohn says, they haven't always worked as designed. The FCC has now, for well over a decade, paid out tens of billions of dollars to rural broadband companies to build internet access in places where there's no internet access. And the fact of the matter is, is that the government has gotten a very, very poor return on its investment. This FCC, and I'll even say, you know, the FCC that I work for, has not done a very good job of demanding that these companies tell us what they've actually built with the money they've gotten. This is not making the FCC look too good. I don't think it's incompetence. I think part of it is resources. You know, the FCC's staff has shrunk enormously in the last decade or so.

I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai declined our request for an interview. But in a written response, the FCC says, we ensure efficient, cost-effective spending on subsidies for rural broadband. Earlier this year, Congress passed a law requiring the FCC to improve the way it measures internet access. But the FCC says that nothing will happen unless Congress also pays for it. The FCC simply does not have the $65 million we need to start the process and implement that law through its first year. The FCC has been working on a number of things and implemented that law through its first year. Meanwhile, the agency is promoting new technologies like 5G cellular and low earth orbit satellites that might address our broadband problems someday. But for now, most seem to agree on one thing, that especially these days, the internet should be considered a necessity. Months into the pandemic, Carrie Fugit ended up getting office space in town just to go online. I think at this point, it should be considered a utility just like water or electricity. And especially now that we've experienced this pandemic, we're seeing just how much we rely on it.

The difference between someone who has internet connection and someone who doesn't is just too wide. Here's your steak and eggs. Yeah, what took you so long? You have to go out and catch the cow?

No, but getting it to lay the eggs was a real trick. Linda Lavin served up jokes along with breakfast in the long running TV series Alice. This morning, she's with our Mo Rocca for a round of questions and answers. This past April, a star-studded concert was announced to celebrate Broadway composer Stephen Sondheim's 90th birthday. The lineup included Meryl Streep, Mandy Patinkin, Audra McDonald and Bernadette Peters. It did not include actress and singer Linda Lavin. I just love this.

You go online and you write, this is very exciting, two exclamation points. I'm wondering if you'd like me to sing the boy from The Mad Show. It's Linda Lavin. In that moment, what I really wanted to say was, why the hell am I not on that show? So I tried to say it in a more gracious way and they called.

Lavin ended up singing a comedic Sondheim number she first sang back in 1966. Let's just put it this way, you're willing to advocate for yourself. I'm willing to advocate for myself, absolutely. Sometimes people don't think of you. They don't know you're here.

I'm still here. They don't know you're alive. You gotta let them know.

Gotta let them know. I used to be shy. She's alive all right. It's been 35 years since Linda Lavin ended her run as TV's Alice. How do I stop him from chasing me just for my body?

Let him catch you. And she's been hustling ever since, starring on Broadway where she won a Tony and on shows like Mom. Excuse me.

Look at that tiny tush. I hate her. Once the pandemic set in, she began doing weekly concerts from her Manhattan living room with pianist Billy Stritch. And she's even released a new album.

I've worked more in these two and a half months than I have in two and a half years. I'm not making that up. Growing up in Portland, Maine, music was always a part of Lavin's life. Her mother Lucille sang opera. She sang on the radio and early television.

She sang with George Gershwin. But in those years, doctors would say to women who were career women, if you want to have a baby, you have to give up your career. And that's what my generation comes from, those women. Did your mother give up her career when she was expecting you?

Yeah. When I'm in a spot it's true, I always know what to do. Lavin says her mother always encouraged her to sing. My mother also tells the story that I stood up, I hadn't spoken yet, and that one night there was company and I stood up in my crib and sang God Bless America. For her seventh birthday, she and her girlfriends made a fateful trip to the movies. There's goodbye music I ever danced to. And the movie was Cover Girl with Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly. And I remember it as if it were yesterday. Rita Hayworth came down a ramp.

She was floating in all chiffon. Long ago and far away, I dreamed a dream one day. And I knew right then that that's who I wanted to be and what I wanted to do. As a concession to her parents, she went to college, William and Mary. Right after graduation, she moved to New York.

And went right to work at Bloomingdale's. What department were you in? Handkerchiefs. The least visited department. Lived on a dollar a day.

And I'm not making that up. Lavin found work in plays and musicals. Here she is in a televised version of Damn Yankees. And in 1973, she headed west. And eventually to sitcom stardom. Let me have beef stew.

What's the difference between that and a goulash? About three days. About three days. For nine seasons, Lavin played single mother Alice Hyatt, hoping to make it as a singer but getting by as a waitress at a Phoenix diner. And working for equal pay, equal rights, she politicized me.

Might as well lock up now. The role had a huge effect on me. She soon became an unofficial spokesperson for single working moms. And I decided the best way to do it was to wear my Alice uniform.

And just show up as Alice. Because people knew who she was. And they knew what she stood for. Linda Lavin is 82 now. When she's not working, she's spending time with her dog, Mickey. And her husband, artist and musician, Steve Bakunas. The couple met in 1999. Surprised the hell out of me.

Because? I had no interest in another romance or marriage. I didn't think I was very good at relationship. And I found out that it takes work.

And I'm willing to do the work and so is he. Somebody said to me, We're life like a like a loose garment, Linda. Lighten up.

Bakunas was in Costa Rica when the pandemic started. So for months, the two have been FaceTiming nightly. We just did a fabulous show, honey. But can we just get back to Alice for a minute? There's a new girl in town and she's looking good.

Linda Lavin sang the show's theme song, one of this correspondent's all time favorites. And with different endings. Every season. Every season. It changed. Every season.

We tried a different way with it. Things are great when you stand on your own two feet. I've always wanted to know. Do you prefer bum bum bum bum bum or? I've always wanted to know which side you land on. I've never thought.

OK, then I'll say I prefer. This is The Takeout with Major Garrett. This week, Stephen Law, ally of Mitch McConnell and one of Washington's biggest midterm money men list for me to Senate races where you think Republicans have the best chance of taking a Democratic seat away. Nevada, New Hampshire, not Georgia.

Well, Georgia is right up there, but New Hampshire is a surprise in New Hampshire. People really just kind of don't like Maggie has for more from this week's conversation. Follow The Takeout with Major Garrett on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you ever wonder where vanilla comes from?

Probably not, which is why we think you're in store for quite a journey in the company of our Seth Doan. Do you want to help me cook? Yeah, OK. All of this quarantine, cooking and baking has been a boon for at least one business you probably had not considered. Vanilla.

Open it up. See all the vanilla inside. It's a key ingredient in those cakes and cookies, not to mention ice cream and even Coca Cola. In recent months, worldwide vanilla sales have doubled, which gives new relevance to a story we were working on even before all of this. One that took us on a journey thousands of miles away to the rainforests of Madagascar. We've come to this remote African island nation to find a pale white orchid with the most colorful story. When you see these blossoms, these pods, what do you think?

Ah, makes my heart makes my heart sweet. I love vanilla. Josephine Lockhead is not only an admirer of the plant and our guide, but she runs Cook flavoring company, her family business in California, which has been making vanilla extract for more than 100 years. This spring, they saw an astounding 500% increase in sales. They import literally tons of the raw material. It's incredibly labor intensive.

It is very labor intensive. Each of these blossoms must be pollinated by hand before noon the day it blooms. We call it the queen of the rainforest.

This queen demands constant attention. But while Madagascar supplies 80% of the world's vanilla, it's not native to this island. Mexico is the only place in the world where vanilla was grown, and it was the only place in the world that has a pollinator. A specific bee that pollinates vanilla? The only bee that will pollinate a vanilla orchid. So when French colonists brought this vine to the region in the 1500s, it did not produce vanilla for centuries. Then in the 1850s, the story goes that an enslaved man named Edmund Albus discovered a method of hand pollinating with a tiny toothpick like stick.

Bayman Manjar, a farmer, showed us. The male part with the pollen is on the top. It's separated from the female part by a membrane. So he exposes that, pushes it together, and now the flower is pollinated.

Just have to wait nine months like a baby. It's time consuming, he said. It's not really difficult, but it needs some skill. Now imagine there are around 40 million vanilla orchids in Madagascar. So pound for pound, vanilla is one of the most labor-intensive crops in the world. It's also one of the most expensive, and by weight, can sell for more than silver. What's the value of the vanilla all around us in here?

1.5 million U.S. dollar. In vanilla? In vanilla. Just in here. Just in here.

Wow. Dylan Randry Mihajahas, Madagascar Spices Company, is Josephine Lockhead's biggest supplier. This is for extraction.

His warehouse is under guard, surrounded by barbed wire. To be able to track and trace their vanilla, farmers tattoo each pod while it's still green. Then once it's harvested, there's still more work. The vanilla beans are dipped into hot water to stop photosynthesis. Then the process of drying and curing can go on for months. Expert hands seem to dance over the vanilla as it's sorted and massaged, releasing oils and aroma. The beans are touched more than about 2,000 times before shipping. So by default, Madagascar is the world's vanilla producer.

Why do you say by default? Because the wages are lower than any other wages in any vanilla-producing region in the world. While their vanilla crop is worth about half a billion dollars, Madagascar is one of the poorest countries on earth. Most people here live on around $50 a month. How much do these workers make? They get about $100 a month. Is that a good salary here?

It's good, it's good. How do you make sure that the money being made trickles down to the workers? Well, it's a good salary.

It's a good salary. How do you make sure that the money being made trickles down to the workers? We share the profits with the farmer directly through the bank account that was created.

Serge Rajobelina, who's from Madagascar, heads a cooperative of 4,000 vanilla farmers. They're trying to establish systems as simple as savings accounts and as vital as health centers and schools to help these workers get ahead. Poverty is the most challenging things for conservation. For conservation? For the environment.

How so? If you don't deal with poverty, people are going to look for land, they're going to destroy the forest. We saw that destruction flying over vanilla territory where farmers burn to expand fields in the desire to escape that grinding poverty and cash in on this crop.

Half of Madagascar has been deforested since 1950, threatening habitats including that of the lemur, which only lives in the wild on this island. The high price of vanilla in recent years has exposed other unsavory sides to this spice. Through the entire vanilla process, there is cheating, stealing, theft. When his valuable crop matures, farmer Bayman Manjar will stay in his fields all night long keeping watch. Last year, he told us, half his vanilla was stolen.

I risk my life guarding these beans, he told us, people might be coming to kill me. Incredibly, more than half of the people detained in this prison are accused of stealing vanilla, including more than 100 people. In the capital, Antananarivo, we took hidden cameras into a tourist market to see how vanilla was hawked at high prices. At least 10% of vanilla ends up on the black market. How much?

This one, 120,000 rearii. I'll think about it. Thank you. So you might imagine that's why Josephine Lockhead travels thousands of miles to the crop. Meet producers and examine the product. This is beautiful vanilla.

Take one of the gourmet beans. It has a more subtle aroma. This is really strong.

It's very powerful. Some of her suppliers are able to buy items unimaginable with another crop. She's got a lot of Looks amazing, does she? We are far away from here. Yes, we are.

So she likes these Yes, nice car. Now consider this, at least 95% of products sold as vanilla do not require a farmer at all, nor do they contain real vanilla. The synthetic stuff can be produced in a lab for a 20th of the cost, but Josephine Lockhead would argue also with a fraction of the flavor. If synthetic vanilla were as good as pure vanilla, that would be the way to go.

We wouldn't have to go through all of this laborious, tedious, risky process. Vanilla is a work of art, and you just can't treat it like a bag of sugar. There's so much that goes into it. And we'd like to think this much is certain. Now at our journey's end, we bet you'll never think of it again as plain vanilla. It's all but impossible to hug those near and dear to us from six feet away.

So what to do? Luke Burbank has been asking the experts. You might have seen this video when it first went viral, you know, back in the before times. It's adorable, sure, but it also demonstrates something about us humans, about something we need that we're not getting enough of these days. When we hug a person, both people in that exchange release oxytocin.

That's right. We're not getting our daily requirement of hugs, says Emiliana Simon Thomas, who studies human happiness at UC Berkeley. When we release oxytocin, we feel pleasure. We feel warmth. We feel that sense of safety.

Our stress physiology becomes quieter. Oxytocin is a really important part of our collective demeanor as as a species, a species that these days is supposed to be socially distanced, which, while safer, can feel very isolating, any way you look at it, zero physical contact is bad for our health. But says Simon Thomas, there are still ways to stay connected.

I think it's going to be a challenge. And I think we are going to have to take on some compensatory behaviors. If it's something like making eye contact more deliberately with other people who we encounter, even at a six foot distance in times where previously we might have just walked by, we need to make that eye contact. Simon Thomas says there are still things we can do to boost our oxytocin, engaging in small talk with strangers. And weird as it may sound, even hugging ourselves solo can help make up for some of this loss of human connection. But the big question is, is hugging someone outside your bubble ever OK these days? If you want zero risk, don't hug.

Lindsay Marr is an environmental engineer at Virginia Tech and a leading expert on how the virus is transmitted. She says there's still hope for the hug, but there are some rules. If there's someone you really want to hug, I think the safest way to do it is to, first of all, make sure both people are wearing a mask. Second of all, start from a distance, cross that distance quickly to get to your hug, keep your faces away from each other, in fact, pointing in opposite directions. If you're having trouble visualizing it, the New York Times published this handy guide to safe, or at least safer, hugging for reference.

It's based on Marr's recommendations. Meanwhile, in Washington state, where I live, some of the strict quarantine measures were lifted, which had me excited to hug my daughter for the first time in three months. I printed out this helpful graphic from the New York Times. I texted it to her, so we're on the same page about safe hugging, and she just showed up. So let's see how this goes. Hey! Hi! Come on in. OK, wait. There you go.

There you go. Hi! Hi! Analyze this hug. How was it? It was great because you were both wearing masks, it looks like you pointed your faces away from each other. If I had to critique one thing, there was a bit of, you know, maybe a few seconds where you kind of lingered at a distance of a few feet, like taking each other in. That's where you kind of want to sprint to get to your hug, do the hug, and then sprint away from each other. But otherwise, I would say that's a pretty good hug. Even if you can't get a pretty good hug in real life, Emeliana Simon-Thomas says just the memory of a good hug can go a long way. We all have to sort of figure that equation out for ourselves, and then I also think for adults in particular, we can use our powers of visualization, we can imagine the times that we have been touching people who we trust and care about. So go ahead and watch all the adorable hugging videos you want.

After all, it's self-care. Something we can probably all use a little more of these days. In the world of country music, Tanya Tucker is unquestionably a legend. Back before the live music world shut down, she talked about her long career with our Bob Schieffer. On a cold and rainy December Sunday outside Northern Virginia's Birchmere Music Hall, the sell-out crowd was lining up five hours before showtime.

How about you guys? Some even earlier. We've been here since 2007 this morning, we were first. And there inside, Tanya Tucker was doing what she's been doing since she was nine years old, getting ready to put on a show. After more than 50 years on stage, we met up with Tucker just after her nomination for not just one, but four Grammys, more than any other country singer. Has it sunk in yet?

You know, I don't really think so. Now it's like, well, you know, it's great to be nominated, but you know, it'd be nice to win one too. Tucker wound up winning not just one, but two for best country song and country album. They were her first Grammys after a career full of hits. Since the ripe old age of 13, she's had nearly two dozen top 40 albums. Thanks for all the number one songs, you know, that you've given me.

Hell, I like the number tens, you know. She became country music's wild child with a personal life that has often grabbed more attention than her music. But her latest album has made her the critic's darling and it's her music that's making headlines again.

Well, I got to tell you, I got my marching orders here. I'm told do not ask her how she likes this comeback because you say it's not a comeback. So what is it? Gosh, you know, I like the word relaunch. Relaunch?

Yeah, relaunch. It wasn't something that I had really planned out and it really just kind of happened. Well, isn't that always the best way when something just sort of happens?

Well, of course. You make plans and God chuckles, you know, when you start making plans. God only knows how oilfield roughneck Jesse Bo Tucker recognized the potential in his youngest daughter, Tanya Denise, born 1958 in Seminole, Texas. But by age nine, she knew what she wanted and her father was with her all the way. I was ready then but they just weren't ready for me because my dad always said, you're a nine-year-old girl. He said, so that means you're going to have to put twice as much feeling in that song you're singing.

He said, because they're not going to believe a nine-year-old kid singing them. You ain't woman enough to take my man. In 1970, she landed an audience with legendary Nashville producer Billy Sherrill, still hot after his success with Tammy Wynette's Stand By Your Man. Sherrill wanted Tanya to record an age-appropriate song called The Happiest Girl in the Whole USA. She was set on another. It started out, she's 41 and her daddy still called her baby. And I said, well now that is my song. She's 41 and her daddy still calls her baby.

All the folks around Brownsville say she's crazy. Delta Dawn is sung from the point of view of a middle-aged faded beauty. Producer Billy Sherrill heard Bette Midler of all people sing it on The Tonight Show, yet somehow he saw fit to offer it to Tucker.

Delta Dawn, what's that flower you have on? Could it be a faded rose some days gone by? And did I hear you say he wasn't meeting you here today?

To take you to his mansion in the sky? It is just one of the all-time. The lyrics seem so improbable coming from a 13-year-old that the record label tried to keep Tanya's age a secret. That didn't last long. And as the hits rolled in, so did the money. The little girl with the big girl's voice took on some grown-up habits, drinking, drugs and romance. Do you think in any way any of that hurt your career?

You know, it could have, I mean, it probably did in some ways, but in a way, I don't think you could be successful unless you've had a lot of failures, and I've had some. The same can be said for her love life. Though she was never married, she's raised her three children as a single mother and made no apologies for it. Throughout the 1980s, she carried on a public affair with Glen Campbell, who was more than two decades her senior. It was the kind of love that I think I probably found it too soon in life, and it was not mature enough at that time.

I think if we'd met later on, we would have made it, because it was love there. It's just the sort of feeling you hear in her songs, the emotion that has always cut through the tabloid headlines. Maybe that's why Tucker's fans use one particular word to describe her. She's real. She's the real deal. She's real, very real. What you see is what you get. Well, you get a lot with her. Yeah, you do.

Yes, they do. And the more real she gets, the more they love her. My eyes have been open the whole time. Thank you very much. Thank you.

The rodeo's just an old man's dream. As it turns out, two of Tucker's biggest fans would help compose this latest chapter in her life story. Tanya wants to do an intro with Shooter on the piano. In 2018, musician and producer Shooter Jennings, the son of country giant Waylon Jennings, recruited superstar singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile to write new material for Tucker. Bottoms up, bitches. But it was a song that Tucker has been trying to put on paper for decades that would, with Carlile's help, bring the entire project into focus.

Don't spend time and tears of money on my own breathless body. If your heart is in them flowers, bring them on. It kind of chokes me up just hearing you sing it, because it makes you think of the times that you'd wished you'd told someone.

Absolutely. It's caused me to make a real effort to try to tell those that I love that I do love them, and even some of those that I don't, you know? And even though one day they'll bury me and Jessie Rae.

Bring My Flowers Now is the sound of a more reflective Tanya Tucker. At age 61 here in Franklin, Tennessee, she surrounds herself with the people and the animals she loves. Jennen has my baby boy. Jennen's going to go in the box with me, and of course his daddy, who's already in a little small box. He'll go in there with me.

We'll have to have an extra big box, though, because I have five dogs and two horses. We're going to be together forever. Tanya Tucker has packed a lot of living in her time on earth. Since she was a little girl, her voice has been her ticket.

And her voice has never had more to offer than it does today. My dad always told me, he said, do you know how to change the world? He said, you build your platform, you know? You build it, build it, build it till you can't build it any higher, till you can't get no higher. And that's when you can change the world, because then people will listen to you.

That's the thing. I want to not just be another female on this planet. I want to change a lot of things. Well, I think you're going to change people when you remind them to bring the flowers now. And that's just another way of saying, show me you love me now. Don't hesitate.

Because how wrong can you be? Forget about losing track of the days during the pandemic. Our Jim Gaffigan is losing track of the months. It's already August?

But is it really? I mean, the calendar may indicate that it's August. The weather outside might feel like August.

Beautiful. The corn I planted would make you think it's August. But is it really August?

Wait, I planted corn? It can't be August. There wasn't a July or a June or a May. There was definitely an April. I remember April. It felt like a cruel extension of March. What if we're still in March?

It could still be March. I'm still doing the same thing I was doing in March. I'm still only hanging around these people I call my family, like I did in March. I'm still dressing like I'm struggling with a hangover, like I did in March.

I still don't understand how those Zoom meetings work. I still watch the news, frustrated and flabbergasted, like I was in March. I still don't understand that term new normal, like I didn't understand it in March. How can something be new and normal?

How can something be normal and new? I got to chuck my corn. This is all mine. That's why I know it's not March, because I'm growing corn, and why am I growing corn? I'm Jane Pauley. Please join us when our trumpet sounds again next Sunday morning.

Now streaming. I used to believe in progress, that no matter what we do, we just end up back at the start. We're in crazy time. The Paramount Plus original series, The Good Fight, returns for its final season. The point isn't the end. The point is winning. There are bad people in the world. The best way to protect the good people is to convict the bad. So here's to us. The Good Fight, the final season, now streaming exclusively on Paramount Plus.